For ten years or so, I have been going full tilt to the Maine International Film Festival (MIFF) held in July in Waterville, Maine. For ten days each summer, usually when the weather is at its finest, I have spent much of the time in the dark, watching flickering images. Some years I have seen as many as twenty-seven movies, and by the end, to quote my friend Susan Poulin, I have felt like road kill. Now, at each festival there are films that I have come to refer to as clunkers and stinkers, the bad and the excruciatingly unwatchable. However, most of the movies at MIFF are worth seeing, and every year, there are at least one or two that are outstanding, nearly perfect films that in all likelihood I never would have seen if I had not gone to the festival. Still, by the end, I was exhausted by all the sound and the visual stimulation, and, additionally, my Wolf Moon work piled up. To add to the fun, for many years I wrote about every movie I saw, and those reviews would then be posted in the web magazine. To say that MIFF was a busman’s holiday was indeed quite an understatement.

This year, I vowed, things would be different. There would be no more bleary eyes, no more fidgeting through the third or fourth movie of the day, no more popcorn-fueled binges. Instead, I would be the soul of moderation. I would see ten, maybe twelve, movies and write about what I saw in a relaxed, considered kind of way. Instead of quantity, I would have quality. Because of this leisurely pace, I would be able to keep up with my Wolf Moon work, which would make postfestival recovery that much easier. Oh, yes, I had a plan. I would be resolute. I would be disciplined. And I was very proud of myself for finally going on a long overdue movie diet. I hate to admit it, but I was perhaps even a little smug.

My movie friends, in particular Alice and Joel Johnson, reacted politely when they heard the news, but I couldn’t help wonder if thoughts of “movie puritan” were flashing through their minds. My husband, Clif, and my daughter Dee were also supportive, but I knew they believed I would be a darned fool to pass up such a feast of movies. After all, wasn’t gluttony the point of a film festival? Would I hold back if I were going on a food tour that would, say, take in the best donut shops in New England? I would not, but MIFF was different, I told myself. It went on for ten days, and even though I am confirmed foodie, I would think twice before going on a ten-day donut spree.

Like all such regimes, my MIFF 2009 resolution got off to a good start. It began the way it usually did, with chocolate martinis and a meal at Bread Box Café in Waterville. We were joined by Alice and Joel Johnson, and we had our usual jolly time, helped along, of course, by the chocolate martinis. Joel, who trains all through the year, was well prepared for the MIFF movie marathon. He was ready to watch films and to blog for Wolf Moon. Dee, who lives in New York City and goes to film festivals throughout the year, was also in trim and ready to go. When it comes to movies, neither Alice nor Clif are slouches, and they approached the festival with the calm assurance of seasoned pros. I was the odd woman out, so to speak.

On Friday, I saw two movies, which was the plan. The first was John Connolly: Of Blood and Lost Things. This short (fifty-two minutes) but fascinating documentary is about John Connolly, an Irish writer who divides his time between Ireland and Maine. His “signature character” is Charlie Parker, a P.I. who lives in Maine. The film was shot in Maine in the winter, and the cold, austere landscape was used to punctuate the equally bleak landscape of the crime novel, where blood and murder most foul paradoxically bring about a winter of the soul. Connolly, dark, attractive, and engaging, spoke about his life, his writing, and his need to leave Ireland to establish a literary identity separate from the Irish experience that has become a hallmark of that country. It is a rich tradition that has produced many great writers, but it was not a tradition he wanted to follow. And Connolly has that right. As E. B. White famously put it, “In a free country, it is the duty of writers to pay no attention to duty.”

I am not a fan of crime novels and have never read any of Connolly’s books. In the film, excerpts from some of the Charlie Parker novels were read, and unfortunately the writing seemed to have the clichés that are all too common for that genre. If crime fiction were all that Connolly had written, I would have considered the film interesting but would not have felt compelled to go any further. However, Connolly has branched out, so to speak, to children’s fantasy, and the featured excerpts were quite different in tone and style from those of the crime novels, more Neil Gaiman and much less clichéd. I was particularly interested in The Book of Lost Things, which I was able to borrow from my daughter Shannon, and I have already begun reading it. A side note: Connolly’s crime fiction, clichéd though it might be, is what brings the advances and the loyal following that makes him a best-selling writer. On the other hand, his publisher would not give him an advance for The Book of Lost Things, and there is some indication that it was only at Connolly’s insistence that Lost Things was published at all. I have never been able to understand why people like blood and guts and clichés, but that seems to be the way things are.

Finally, as an added bonus, Connolly was at this screening, and after the movie was over, he answered questions. In real life, he is just as attractive and engaging as he is on screen, and he has that wonderful articulateness that seems to spring from the Irish culture.

The second movie we saw was Pachamama, a Bolivian film about a young boy’s trip with his father to deliver salt to remote villages in the Andes. A colorful, tinkling llama caravan carries the blocks harvested from salt plains, and there are some beautiful scenes of the countryside in this movie. Unfortunately, the scenery could not save the movie from being a clunker. The characters were flat, and the narrative was, at times, incomprehensible and random. A movie to either fidget or snooze through but certainly not to recommend.

The next day, on Saturday, I saw only one movie, and I marveled at my restraint. Never in my film festival history have I only seen one movie on Saturday, where the movies begin at noon and end at midnight. With some careful planning, it would have been possible to see four movies that day. Whereas I just nibbled the edges and saw one. Fortunately, luck was with me, and the movie, Ghost Bird, was a good one.

Ghost Bird is a sad documentary that chronicles an activity we humans seem to excel at. That is, driving animals to extinction. In this case, it is the ivory-billed woodpecker, a big, beautiful bird of the Southeast whose habitat was the deep woods. As the Audubon website puts it, the ivory-bills needed “extensive and continuous areas of forest that contain very large trees, and with a good supply of recently dead trees for food, nesting, and roosting. Softwood trees, that reach a large size more quickly and are easier to excavate, seem important.” However, those huge tracts of land with “the very large trees” caught the attention of the logging companies, who proceeded to clear them. This habitat loss devastated the ivory-billed woodpecker population, but hunters and the collectors finished the job. In their zeal to collect “skins” and sell them to institutions such as Harvard, the hunters and collectors blasted the ivory-bills into extinction. In the 1930s, Jim Tanner, a PhD student at Cornell University, estimated there might have been twenty-two to twenty-four ivory-billed woodpeckers left in the United States. (Studying and searching for ivory-bills was part of Tanner’s dissertation for Cornell.) The last confirmed sighting of ivory-bills was in the 1950s.

But in 2004, a kayaker supposedly caught sight of one in the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas, and this caused a huge stir in the bird world. John Fitzpatrick, director of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, seemed to want to believe in the ivory-bills’ existence as much as the Victorians and Edwardians wanted to believe in fairies. With the backing of Cornell to confirm the ivory-bill sighting, Fitzpatrick and a host of birders descended on Brinkley, Arkansas, which is near the Cache River National Wildlife Refuge. The hunt was afoot.

Ghost Bird, a PBS-quality documentary with beautiful cinematography, does a neat job of contrasting the desperation of Brinkley, a hardscrabble town hoping to capitalize on the ivory-bill, with the desperation of Fitzpatrick and others in the birding world hoping to find the ivory-bill. One can certainly sympathize with Fitzpatrick. Who wouldn’t want this beautiful bird to have somehow miraculously survived hunters and habitat destruction? Yet, as shown in the film, the evidence doesn’t look good. Aside from one blurry video, there are no recent photographs to back up the reported sightings. Not one. And no one has actually caught a long, good view of the bird. Instead, the sightings always seem to involve just a flurry of feathers before the bird disappears. Cornell has spent a lot of money looking for ivory-bills, and many ornithologists believe that money would have been better spent protecting other species that are not yet extinct.

If only we could all collectively clap our hands, say we believe in the ivory-bills, and bring them back to life. But, alas, the ivory-billed woodpecker really does seem to be extinct, which means there is no bringing them back.

On Sunday, I saw three movies, one of them nearly perfect, and although I didn’t know it at the time, this would prove to be my undoing. After watching three movies, one of which was superb, and meeting with other movie lovers to discuss what we had seen, I caught film festival fever, and I went off the wagon. I had planned to take off Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Instead, I went to MIFF on all those days and even saw three movies on Thursday. My youngest daughter Shannon predicted this would happen, and she even agreed to come over on Thursday night to take care of the dog so that I could have my three-movie night.

I am writing this before the festival ends, but it looks as though I will see twenty-two movies rather than the ten or twelve I had originally planned. Well, why fight it? After all, we are lucky to have such a wonderful film festival so close to us in central Maine. The film festival comes but once a year. I might as well give in and enjoy it and not have any pretenses about restraint.

While I am not going to write about every movie I have seen (I’ll leave that to Joel Johnson, Wolf Moon’s movie meister), I do have two must-see movies that I want to mention.

I’ll start with the best first, The Necessities of Life, that rare kind of movie that movie lovers seek when they go to film festivals. The Necessities of Life, directed by Benoît Pilon, is a Québecois film set in the 1950s. It’s about a man named Tivii, an Inuit who lives a traditional life with his family on the remote island of Baffin. When a medical boat comes to provide health care to the islanders, Tivii is diagnosed with tuberculosis and is sent to a sanitarium in Québec City, where he must stay for a couple of years with, of course, no guarantee of recovery. To be separated so long from one’s home and one’s family would be hard on anyone, but for Tivii, who has never seen trees or stairs or a toilet or spaghetti, it is especially difficult. He is not able to speak French, which means no one can really explain all that is going on or even just give him basic words of comfort. He is completely alone and alienated from the brusque but well-meaning staff as well as the other patients. He understandably becomes suicidal, but he is fortunate in gaining the sympathies of a young nurse, who helps him adjust to his new surroundings. More important, she introduces him to a young orphan named Kaki, also an Inuit but one who can speak French. Tivii and Kaki form a tight bond, and the film focuses on their relationship as both try to recover from a life-threatening disease.

I really cannot say enough good things about this moving, beautifully shot film. I am not familiar with Benoît Pilon, but I would have to say that The Necessities of Life is the work of a great humanist, one who sees the world from many points of view and has sympathy for them all. Each character in the film, even the minor ones, is vividly portrayed, and they come together to form a rich mosaic. Especially good is Natar Ungalaaq, who plays Tivii’s disorientation and despair with such aching clarity that the audience feels it right along with him. As I have mentioned previously, this is a nearly perfect film, a rare gem, and if it comes to a theater near you, then do not hesitate. Go see it.

Reporter, a documentary about the New York Times journalist Nicholas Kristof, is not a nearly perfect film. The cinematography is amateurish and the structure is perhaps not as tight as it should be. Nevertheless, it is a film that should be seen because of the timely but difficult issues it raises. How do we address great suffering brought on by war, starvation, chaos, and, it must be said, evil? Kristof has based his career on going to poor countries where there is extreme misery, and he has tried to personalize the victims so that people in rich countries will care enough to do something. In Reporter, Kristof speaks at length about the psychology of compassion, about how our minds become numb if we are confronted with too many people who need our help. It seems we do better on a one by one basis. Yes, yes, we nod in agreement; we are overwhelmed by the thought of thousands of people suffering. Yet, as the film follows Kristof and two interns to the Congo, an uncomfortable thought emerges, not just about the Congo, but about everyplace that has either a brutal government or, worse yet, no government at all. That is, how can individuals address a problem that is not really personal but is instead an outcome of savage leadership or civil war? We can send food and supplies, but until a country becomes secure, until people stop shooting each other, then that help will never be enough. Even Kristof himself acknowledges this. Perhaps I am being unduly pessimistic, but I really don’t see any kind of good, individual solution to stopping the misery brought on by a government’s greed and viciousness. Even actions by concerned countries don’t work. Sanctions? How effective are they? Not very. United Nations intervention? It doesn’t have enough muscle. And, do we really want it to have a powerful enough military force to combat brutal regimes and genocide? Police action by strong, secure countries? In other words, invasion? We know how well that sort of thing turns out. While I admire Kristof for his toughness, courage, and persistence, I can’t help but wonder, in the end, how much he really accomplishes with his writing. Countries continue to implode, bringing civil war, genocide, misery, and starvation. I hope I am wrong. I hope that his work does matter. In the meantime, we send supplies to such places as the Congo. It seems better than nothing. For the people who benefit by the supplies, it is better than nothing. It gives them life. And, perhaps a slim chance to turn things around.